The Recipe of Life

… for health and happiness now

On the counter rest several ingredients for soup. There are several spices in containers. Bowls contain various vegetables like chopped onions, carrots and spinach. Olive oil sits in a bottle. Cups of water are waiting. A ripe lemon rests alone. All the items for a wonderful soup is ready to be combined.

To make the soup certain items need to be cooked first. Other items are added later. A harmony is orchestrated to bring forth the result: soup.

If one ingredient is bad, having good soup is threatened.

If the cooking procedure is not timed correctly, having good soup is threatened.

All the little pieces have to be of good quality and the timing of adding those items and cooking them has to be correct. A good soup doesn’t make itself.

A good, healthy, happy mind doesn’t make itself.

Jenny at MyLifeRecipe.com makes a great point that life is like cooking. On her About page she says “my mission was to become aware of everything in my life that worked and didn’t work, and continuously update my recipe.” We need healthy ingredients timed appropriately to produce happy outcomes. If the result is not pleasing, change an ingredient and try again. Our goal is to live a happy life (and eat good soup!).

Imagine how difficult it would be to make soup knowing only one instruction at a time without knowledge of the previous or following step. Imagine making soup while having no vision of a final goal (which is soup) with no memory of the first step took and what the last step completed was. This is what it’s like making soup with blinders on. Then the next moment we suddenly have soup! How did that happen? Perhaps we ended with a mess. How did that happen? When went wrong? If we could only understand how we got to this mess…

When life is not going our way we may feel blind and confused at what the problem is and how to fix it. Our myopic vision focused so close at one aspect of our lives like job, school or family fails to see the whole picture, the metadata of one’s totality of existence. So when something goes wrong in life, generally speaking, our narrow vision focused on work and personal life does not have the wider scope to spot the error. Without the proper vision to identify the problem makes us unable to fix the problem that is throwing out life out of whack.

If we cannot find the cause of our life’s ills then we take stabs in the dark hoping to patch blindly the source of pain. This approach is not effective nor accurate. It lacks precision and lacks knowledge. If we had a guide to isolate intelligently the source of a problem we would be more effective in getting our life on track, ease our pain and start living life to its fullest.

Look at the soup again. Above I illustrated two parts: ingredients and timing. Both are separate from one another and do not share characteristics. One are objects and the latter is a timed action. Both unrelated yet are required to blend seamlessly to produce soup. Our health and happiness also depend on several factors working harmoniously in concert.

I find it helpful to look at life as three parts: food, lifestyle and service. When all three parts come together with the right ingredients, joy results. An error in one of these three parts can cause our happiness to diminish.

Let me describe what these three life parts are. Food is what we eat to sustain our fleshy existence. Lifestyle includes everything outside work and food. Lifestyle contains our attitude towards life, our dress code, our habits, what we do on our time off, who we choose to share life with, what music we listen to, what we read, physical activity, how we present ourselves to reality and more. Service is what we are here to do. We all give back to the Universe. If you give back that which you are not here to give, then you have a job. If you give back what brings joy, then you do not have a job. You have a purpose. Bob Dylan taught me that. That’s what I mean by Service.

Instead of looking at life as one big jumble of stuff that makes up each day, we can break life down into three categories to fit under our accustomed myopic vision. How is the food and diet part working out? Do we enjoy the results to our mind and body that our food provides? Do we love our job or are grinding away to pay the bills? Do our friends support us or cause needless drama in our lives? How do people react to us in public? Three parts, three answers. We can look to see where our life is broken and fix it.

By breaking daily life down into separate components, we can pinpoint a source of unhappiness, fix it, then continue in life with a greater sense of control, understanding and knowledge. Breaking life up into three parts, food, lifestyle, and service allows us to troubleshoot our life recipe and fix the ingredient errors that prevent happiness. Break out your pen and paper and isolate which section of life needs improvement that will lead you to a greater sense of joy. Then upgrade it.

Later I will go into detail with food, lifestyle and service to help determine if those areas of life are benefiting you or holding you back of obtaining joy.